Craig Neil has sold the company he spent nearly 24 years building, offloading NSC to Telstra for a reported $100 million.

NSC is not totally unfamiliar to Telstra; the medium-sized enterprise specialist has call centre experience, a long working relationship with hardware manufacturer Avaya and a five-year enterprise IP telephony agreement signed in 2007.

The move may be beneficial for all involved, with reports NSC’s 230 staff will stay on to work for Telstra’s network applications and services (NAS) arm. Mr Neil himself is not on the bread-line either – he will take up an as-yet-undecided role to oversee the integration of the two companies.

Mr Neil says it’s a win for Australia’s customer service sector: “Telstra was probably providing half of the available technologies for contact centres and unified communications into the marketplace and we were doing the other half... it’s in a sense a perfect storm to be able to provide a full offering to organisations,” he said.

Telstra NAS head David Burns says “adding NSC’s capability to Telstra’s own unified communications and network-based services including cloud, managed networks and security, will help us create even more compelling solutions.”